Archibald MacLeish

“A poem should not meanBut be.”

“Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world.”

“And here face down beneath the sunAnd here upon earth's noonward heightTo feel the always coming onThe always rising of the night”

“The business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call human life - to reduce it to order but at the same time to give it possibility, scope, even dignity.”

“A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard -- by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off”

“Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man's life if he has the weight and cares about the words.”

“Journalism wishes to tell what it is that has happened everywhere as though the same things had happened for every man. Poetry wishes to say what it is like for any man to be himself in the presence of a particular occurrence as though only he were alone there.”

“Spring has many American faces. There are cities where it will come and go in a day and counties where it hangs around and never quite gets there. Summer is drawn blinds in Louisiana, long winds in Wyoming, shade of elms and maples in New England.”

“A man who lives, not by what he loves but what he hates, is a sick man.”

“The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.”

“You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames.”

“Around, around the sun we go:The moon goes round the earth.We do not die of death:We die of vertigo.”

“What is more important to a library than anything else -- than everything else -- is the fact that it ex”

“As things are now going, the peace we will make, the peace we seem to be making, will be a peace of oil, a peace of gold, a peace of shipping, a peace, in brief... without moral purpose or human interest.”

“What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice.”

“There are those who will say that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is the American Dream.”

“To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold - brothers who know now they are truly brothers.”

“We have no choice but to be guilty. God is unthinkable if we are innocent.”

“We knock upon silence for an answering music.”

“Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man.”